Some thoughts on AMDs position

[Bastieeeh]

Besides the usual R600 and K10/Barcelona talk that keeps us busy all day long there is another side of AMD that many people don't seem to realize: the financial part. If you are interested on being reading some well written thoughts I would suggest a recent two-part article at Overclockers.com. There Ed Stroligo explains AMDs actual financial situation with all the losses of revenue during the last quarter and gives some forecasts on how AMD will react to this.

Get to the first part here and don't miss the second part.

Btw.: There are several other interesting articles about various subjects of the computer sector at their front page.

[Sent1nel]

Although none of that is concrete, it more or less makes a lot of sense of as to what AMD is up to. Over all though if AMD turn fall apart (now or later) it means BAD news for us consumers.

[kwchang007]

not good. that article never talked about spinning off ati...wonder if they're even thinking about it.

[anticlutch]

I can only imagine how depressed and how much stress is on the CEO (as well as the other top people at AMD). AMD should have held off on buying ATi until they had their 65nm or 45nm fabs in place... if AMD goes down, that means ATi will go down as well

[Sasqui]

Originally Posted by anticlutch

I can only imagine how depressed and how much stress is on the CEO (as well as the other top people at AMD). AMD should have held off on buying ATi until they had their 65nm or 45nm fabs in place... if AMD goes down, that means ATi will go down as well

Indeed... someone is going to end up owning a lot of intellectual properties and patents, but when the body dies, the head goes with it.

Another one of my predictions: NVidia or Intel will end up buying the leftovers at a fire sale.

[Zero Cool]

so if ATi and AMD falls, 90% of the market will be Intel and nVidia... no competition

I actually want to study in the messachussetts institute of technology and hopefully get a job at AMD

[EastCoasthandle]

Bullcrap, AMD does not make video cards. Hell, they don't even put AMD on video cards!!

[Thermopylae_480]

I'm sure they will soon.

[EastCoasthandle]

That would make them a liar when they said they wouldn't. Truth of the matter is that AMD simply merged with ATI who make video cards bottom line. Talking about AMD as video card manufactures is a farce. The truth of the matter then? AMD only real news is barcelona, that's it. R600 is still an ATI exclusive:
-It does not come branded as a AMD product (fanboys needs to deal with this)
-It was in production before the AMD/ATI merger
-Offers no tangible benefit over Intel (if it did they would be sued).

[yogurt_21]

wow, we're talking what one quarter of falling profits and they're already saying "the end is near!" wtf what a dumbass. intel had sliding profits and stocks for two years straight, no one said "hey look out intels going under" thats because it takes ALOT to kill multi billion dollar businesses. barcelona will be what it is, and no it doesn't have to beat intel , just be good enough performance wise and have a nice price (something amd has always been better at then intel). and while ati atm is an anchor, once the r600 line is released it wont be anymore, again regardless of performance, why because ati tends to have more loyal customers than nv, when the x800 came out is wasn't faster than the 6800 ultra, yet many still bought it knowing that the image quality would make up for the performance gap. its likely to be the same here, though we'll see the true performance once launched.

yes amds finalcial situation my look bleak to the untrained and overall young eye (this has nothing to do with age and everything to do with experience), but thats exactly what happens when you buy a company and lose market dominace in one fell stroke. Now if any of you ahve paid attention you'll note another company had this happen a few years back, nvidia boguht 3dfx and launched their geforce fx series at the same time. the fx series was a blatant loss and they had spent money they could have used on development to buy 3dfx.

the result?they survived easily and
SLI- huge success
nvidia 6xxx series - huge success
nforce 4 chipset- huge success


this guy needs to get his head out of his you know what and pay attention. 90nm fab won't hurt amd badlya nd it'll enable them to work more on the ati sector to get
1)better chipsets
2)unified drivers
3) more economy class cards and motherboards(where most of the market is)
4) future development capabilities

amd is nowhere near finacial ruin, and in fact even though this guy puts sooo much emphasis on the loss of 65nm this year, it will be enable next year along with a few new goodies making this quarter a distant finacial memory.

[tkpenalty]

Look, AMD does not get all the shit, thats why they have a "depression" it happens often... But AMD is nowhere near banrkuptcy, its more like they are spending more to excel. Take the K10 and R600... reason why its taking so long for it to come out is because ATI wants to perfect the GPU. If AMD processors get 45nm, so will their GPUs. Think about that, AMD does not want to hurt fanboys by removing the ATI name.

as untrained an eye as i might have, i almost want to cry, i've been an avid amd fan, and even plan on getting am2 or k8l, or any other chipset but you do wanna know what sux, i had, and i say "had" with emphasis i lot of stock in amd for years, and unfortunately, had to let it go when it started dropping, macroscopically amd may pull out of this drop a kickass cpu and all the other amenities of a world class multi billion dollar corporation but for the lowly stock holder like myself who's got over 80k in stocks, it's a very real thing when a company reaches these financial situations. and i'll tell you what i've done, amd may split some shares which is kick ass in the long run, but they stocks will drop to half the price i bought them at and i'll end up with the same money i've got in it now with a higher quantity, that may sound good, but when amd is in dire straights, it's not, because splitting shares means amd is trying to get people to pick it up at a very low price, and in this scenario, they have nothing to offer that is set in stone, they're next chips is not faster then c2d or anywhere near penryn, and i'm not an intel fanboy, i hate intel but amd is not showing anything close to the performance and price, and that will cost someone like me who is a stock holder in they're stock, and it's gonna cost amd if a lot of stock holders find out whats really going on, most people have stock in amd because it's a "large company" with a "solid background" but they don't know what exactly is going on, i'm a consumer who's spent thousands on they're shit, and i'll spend even more until they are completely gone, and if they die off and the lose the battle and intel takes over, then all i got to say is amd had a really good run, they came from mediocre to friggon awsome and put up a hell of a fight, intel might just have it this time, and i really feel like crying right now.

[tkpenalty]

Dude do you remember the Prescott and Williamette days? Yep... Intel got their asses kicked. Its just that right now more people have access to the internet and are making false alarms... there is no problem atm, AMD is about to release the next generation anyway.

[kwchang007]

Originally Posted by yogurt_21

wow, we're talking what one quarter of falling profits and they're already saying "the end is near!" wtf what a dumbass. intel had sliding profits and stocks for two years straight, no one said "hey look out intels going under" thats because it takes ALOT to kill multi billion dollar businesses.

ok, when intel was doing horrible (cough cough prescott) they still had pleanty of cash on hand. Even though they had a horrible preforming desktop chip, they're laptop chips still kept them alive and got them to the point they're at right now. If you look at the evolution of the pentium m, you can see how much work was put into making the core 2 duo. it is obvious intel had pleanty of money, enough to keep shrinking dies, and improve their mobile archtechure every 2 or 3 years. intel survived only because it was large and had the money, amd is multi billion, and they pump billions of dollars into r&d and into redoing their fab plants. yeah, intel has toe spend money on the exact same thing, but they had far more than 1 billion dollars on hand at a given time. I really don't want amd to go under, i'll admit it, im a slight intel fanboy, but the whole thing is competition drives down prices and forces better preformance. imagine if it was only intel, we could still be on something like the pentium 3 (even though clock for clock it killed the p4, it'd still be bad) i hope amd has something they can do to save themselves, not just price cuts and hoping that solves everything.

[yogurt_21]

okay people still aren't getting it.

now younguns might not remember but I remember the k6's (still had one up till december when it died along with my house, but thats a different dstory)
but I do and guess what intel was crushing that by more than conroes can crush am2's. the worst part, a pentium 1 233 could rape a k6 600MHZ, while conroe is good and all theres no conroe that can run at less than half the clock speed of an am2 dual core cpu and beat it.

yet gee hmm amd survived thatand with no where near the money, market share, or sales it has now. the whole problem is that investors ddin't really care so much back then, it was a gambling stock at best. now that amd has come off of a storng series of dominance the investors are getting nervous. they are wrong to do so and definetly short sighted.

as I pointed out earlier the nvidia shareholders were pretty nervous during the fx series, yet those who held on got more than an awesome reward, over double their investment and awesome rigs.

so again one quarter, psh, k6 ran for four.

and btw all you peopel obsessed with the nm on a cpu are in the minority extremist sale are the smallest part of the market. most people who buy cpu's buy them for there performance and cost. not how cool it will run when oced. lol seriously the whole "oh no amd isn't shrinking its die" is a ridiculous aregument when most people buy dells and hps and have no idea whats in them. and amd already has some 65nm cpus out, yes in the midrange where theres more of a market share, so no 65nm highend models matters little if at all

[kwchang007]

Originally Posted by yogurt_21

okay people still aren't getting it.

now younguns might not remember but I remember the k6's (still had one up till december when it died along with my house, but thats a different dstory)
but I do and guess what intel was crushing that by more than conroes can crush am2's. the worst part, a pentium 1 233 could rape a k6 600MHZ, while conroe is good and all theres no conroe that can run at less than half the clock speed of an am2 dual core cpu and beat it.

yet gee hmm amd survived thatand with no where near the money, market share, or sales it has now. the whole problem is that investors ddin't really care so much back then, it was a gambling stock at best. now that amd has come off of a storng series of dominance the investors are getting nervous. they are wrong to do so and definetly short sighted.

as I pointed out earlier the nvidia shareholders were pretty nervous during the fx series, yet those who held on got more than an awesome reward, over double their investment and awesome rigs.

so again one quarter, psh, k6 ran for four.

and btw all you peopel obsessed with the nm on a cpu are in the minority extremist sale are the smallest part of the market. most people who buy cpu's buy them for there performance and cost. not how cool it will run when oced. lol seriously the whole "oh no amd isn't shrinking its die" is a ridiculous aregument when most people buy dells and hps and have no idea whats in them. and amd already has some 65nm cpus out, yes in the midrange where theres more of a market share, so no 65nm highend models matters little if at all

as far as nm the smaller you go the higher you can clock stock, that's the really big part right now. and amd, isn't going away, just may have to downsize in order to stay competitive or have huge price cuts until k10, and only if k10 really has a chance then amd (processor side) will stand well. r600, supposed to kill g80, im still waiting to see real benchmarks and same with k10.

[WarEagleAU]

AMD will be fine. We all should expect a couple of down quarters, I mean hell, it goes with any company buying out another, or merging. But AMD will bounce back, its like a resilient virus that cannot be killed. AMD will be fine and better than ever. Slowly but surely they are increasing the fabs and foundries and will be toe to toe with Intel.

[a111087]

Originally Posted by tkpenalty

Look, AMD does not get all the shit, thats why they have a "depression" it happens often... But AMD is nowhere near banrkuptcy, its more like they are spending more to excel. Take the K10 and R600... reason why its taking so long for it to come out is because ATI wants to perfect the GPU. If AMD processors get 45nm, so will their GPUs. Think about that, AMD does not want to hurt fanboys by removing the ATI name.

i hope that you are right, can't wait till AMD/ATi will wipe intel's a$$